Oscar Howe

Oscar Howe, whose Dakota name was Mazuha Hokshina ("Trader Boy"), was born May 13, 1915, at Joe Creek on the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota. He was Yanktonai Dakota (Sioux). He attended the Pierre Indian School as a child, then studied at the Santa Fe Indian School under Dorothy Dunn in its influential art program during the 1930s, graduating in 1938. In the late 1930s he also worked with the Works Progress Administration's South Dakota Artists Project. He went on to earn a BA from Dakota Wesleyan University in 1952 and an MFA from the University of Oklahoma in 1954.

Howe joined the faculty at the University of South Dakota in 1957, teaching art for more than two decades and eventually becoming Professor Emeritus after his 1980 retirement. In 1958 he wrote a widely cited letter of protest to the Philbrook Art Center after a painting of his was rejected for not conforming to a single, expected "traditional" style of Indian painting, arguing that Native artists deserved the same right to individual style as any other painter. The letter is often described as a turning point that helped open the field to a broader, more individual vision of Native American art. Howe died October 7, 1983, in Vermillion, South Dakota, at age 68.

Institutions and historians consistently describe Howe as a pivotal, boundary-breaking figure, sometimes called the father of the new Native American art for his rejection of the flat, decorative "Studio Style" in favor of a personal, geometric, and dynamic approach to depicting Dakota dance, ceremony, and mythology. Some critics applied the labels Cubist or neocubist to his later work, a characterization Howe himself disputed. His 1958 protest letter to the Philbrook Art Center is frequently cited by museums and historians as a landmark statement against externally imposed definitions of "Indian art." Over a career that institutional summaries describe as including dozens of one-man shows and participation in numerous major exhibitions, he built a reputation as both an innovator and an influential teacher, training generations of students during more than two decades at the University of South Dakota.

Howe's market has historically run through specialist Western and American Indian art sales rather than major evening auctions, and top-tier results remain uncommon. The current auction high is Camte Waste, No No Wa (Good Heart Forever), which sold for USD 325,000 at John Moran Auctioneers in 2023, described by the house as a new world auction record for the artist and a sharp jump from his prior record of USD 58,000, set at the same house in 2020. Other significant recent results include Dancer, which sold for USD 229,900, and Dawn Rider, which sold for USD 181,500, both at the Coeur d'Alene Art Auction on July 27, 2025, along with War Dancer, which brought USD 139,700 at John Moran. The small number of public transactions means any single result should be read with care. Howe has no dedicated commercial gallery representation; his market activity runs through specialist auction houses, while the University of South Dakota serves as the primary steward of his archive.

No catalogue raisonne of Howe's work has been published; the University of South Dakota, which holds the largest single collection of his paintings and drawings, has been reported to be developing a first such project, though this could not be independently confirmed, so provenance research should lean on that archive and on documented exhibition and auction history in the meantime. Auction supply is genuinely limited and concentrated in specialist sales, meaning headline results like the 2023 record can move sharply from one transaction to the next rather than tracing a smooth market curve. Collectors should also expect some variance across secondary sources on exact award years and institutional titles in his biography, a normal feature of a career recorded largely through museum and university archives rather than a single centralized market database.